Hey guys,

I've seen loads of Chinese people have some kind of music player on the computer that functions as a karaoke machine. Basically the lyrics are displayed on your desktop while highlighting the words spoken.
I want to try it out to practise the hanzi I learned on Skritter :P

Does anybody here know where I could get this program? Is it QQ?
Would be appreciated!

Greets,

FeiyueKell

sorry for the post.
I already found it and it is amazing!
Great practise for reading :)

well the post is here, so you might want to tell us the name of the program ;-)

Is it Kugou（酷狗）? http://www.kugou.com/
Or maybe it's the Taiwanese program KKBOX(paid service)? http://tw.kkbox.com/

Now I'm just curious which one you're talking about... >.>

Hey guys,

It's from QQ actually it's really a cool program:
http://music.qq.com/portal_v2/static/player.html

You can add any music for free (legally through their website) to your account and when you play them the lyrics are displayed on your desktop.

You should try it out, really a cool way to use what you have learned :)

But there is a report about that QQmusic at http://www.threatexpert.com/files/qqmusic.exe.html

@pts. Actually, those back doors are hiding them self with names of other software, such as qqmusic.exe, qqmail.exe or similar. Does not have to be qqmusic itself that brings them in. Never the less, stay away from this and actually most other Chinese software. On every trip to China i spend hours to clean up friends computers. It is the same with several of those programs for viewing Chinese movie on line. They are almost always coming with back doors. Most of those threats can be detected with various scanning software but not all of them. Sadly China have become one of the big countries when it comes to cyber crime. If you are concerned about your internet safety, simply do not use any "free" software from China. At least not until you have scanned them properly. Even payed software are often infected. I work for an relatively large international IT company and our Chinese (non company operated) PC:s can easily have over 200 infections when we check them. In most cases those threats are not doing anything but they can be used for various attacks or to steal your credit card information. Simply be causes. Invest in good tools to protect your PC before using any such software.

穆兒 posted a video of himself using this to great effect: http://www.skritter.com/forum/topic?id=49175616

Thanks a lot for the virus warnings! I didn't know about that.

@nick: cannot wait for this feature haha

Mandarinboy:

And this is the reason that if I want to login to my Chinese bank account and transfer money, in addition to a username and password, I have to install three pieces of software, plug in a usb key, + another password for that, run the scanner they provide, and then it's such a badly written piece of software it then freezes out 80% of the time.

A nightmare.

Oh, and I had to install/virtualise windows as naturally the Chinese software wouldn't work on OSX.

There are a lot of Macs here in Shanghai actually, just I'm yet to see one in the wild running anything other than Windows... It's crazy to pay the premium and then get rid of its best feature...

@Byzanti, I know the drill. It is a nightmare. A lot of those softwares are very poorly written and often requires you to have all sorts of other settings or tools according to their standards. By the way, just for fun i did a scan from our apartment in Hangzhou how many wireless network i could get into. Amazing but more than 80% of the nets I could easily use, either they do not encrypt or they use weak ones such as WEP. Equally amazing is to see hoe many Chinese that play Farmwille every day. I must be to old but I simply can't see the fun in that. Well, well. Even I like to test Chinese gadgets so I bought my self an Chinese "Ipad" for 600 RMB. Amazingly it do work even if the specs are a long way from the real thing. And, yes, it did have viruses:-)

@Nick I watched the youtube vidoes, but I don't understand how the songs that are being played relate to the characters that are being practiced on Skritter. It seems to me that there is a song playing, with lyrics on the bottom of the screen, and while this is going on a random set of characters are being practiced on Skritter. Am I missing something?

He's making a joke. The karaoke is unrelated to what he's practicing on Skritter.

I haven't tried karaoke software (other than at KTV in China), but I've been downloading karaoke videos at Youku.com for some time without incident. They have quite a few high-quality music videos, and their downloader is pretty user-friendly). Also, it is intersting to see the mandarin version of things like Spongebob (海绵宝宝).

Mandarinboy what is your opinion on security or otherwise of qq chat and sogou ime?

SOGOU IME is actually sort of fun. It is clean for sure. Never seen any problems with that. There are rumors that Google actually have been "lending" their pinyin database in their applications. This is now corrected with a new database. By the way, that is an awesome IME tool. QQ is a more tricky issue. There are several different QQ clients. All of them are heavy on adware. That is not that dangerous but many of the non official ones comes with all sort of nasty back doors, viruses etc. If you stick with the original (Tencent QQ) that is safe from viruses and back doors. Note, many other viruses etc are using fake QQ files on the system to try to hide them self. Your antivirus software might flag that it is QQ but it in fact it is something else. As always, just be careful and have good protection on your system.

The QQ mac client is pretty good. It has no adware at all. It's an absolute barebones client with no flourishes whatsoever. Ultra grey, ultra minimalist! Suits me!

There's also an "international edition" QQ for Windows. Perhaps this is a lighter on the adware? I haven't tried.

Hey, on the topic of free Chinese programs coming with nasties attached, does anyone know anything about 迅雷 in this respect?

I just installed it so that I can add to my collection of lingoes dictionaries, and it seems to have installed a whole bunch of extra bits that I didn't want, but I haven't quite figured out what's what yet...